To become clinically competent physicians, medical students must develop knowledge and skills in many areas of both the art and science of medicine. Three areas are emphasized in medical students' early clinical training: doctor-patient communication, eliciting the patient history, and performing the physical exam. Standardized patients (SPs), individuals trained to realistically portray patients, are commonly employed to teach and assess medical students in those three areas. By working with SPs, students gain the opportunity to learn and practice the skills of doctor-patient communication, such as eliciting the patient history, conducting the physical exams, and other clinical skills in a safe setting. SPs also provide a way to reliably test students' clinical skills in a realistic setting, interacting with a person. The range of clinical problems an SP can portray, however, is limited. They are typically healthy individuals with few or no abnormal physical findings. While some can be trained to simulate physical abnormalities (e.g., breathing through one lung, voluntarily increasing blood pressure, etc.), there are many abnormalities they cannot simulate.
One way to supplement what students learn from SPs is for the students to separately learn from and practice on simulators. A variety of mechanical or computer-based simulators are now used in medical education, including software for testing clinical reasoning and diagnostic skills, computer simulations of physiological processes, and physical models for practicing selected procedural skills. For example, a completely virtual SP (e.g., an interactive computer program) has been tried before by Hubal et al., as described in “The Virtual Standardized Patient,” Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 2000 (J. D. Westwood et al., eds., IOS Press), who utilized natural language processing and virtual patients that exhibit emotion in a realistic context to provide completely automatic yet unscripted training sessions. A key limitation to these simulators is that their users (e.g., medical students) do not interact with a live person (a patient or SP). Human-computer interaction brings a different set of psychological concerns than does the human-human interaction of a doctor-patient examination. A significant level of immersion is needed to overcome the human-computer interaction aspects so that there is appreciable transfer of training with regard to patient interaction and diagnosis. This level of immersion and interactivity has not been reached and may not be achievable in a totally virtual form with today's technology. Augmenting SPs with the ability to simulate abnormal physical findings would expand the opportunities for students to learn more clinical skills in a realistic setting with a real person (SP) while practicing their doctor-patient communication skills.
In addition, there is currently a need for expanding the breadth of indications associated with known medical conditions that may be portrayed by an SP. For example, with a real or standardized patient, a student is limited to hearing only the sounds of that single person. Learning a variety of sounds has traditionally required examining many patients over time, often without direct supervision and feedback. Commercially available recordings of heart and lung sounds exist, but using them ignores the process of locating the sources of sounds (e.g., correct placement of the stethoscope) and excludes simultaneous interactions with a patient.
Augmenting SPs with the capability of portraying patients with an increased range of medical conditions would make the use of SPs an even more valuable teaching tool. The present invention is directed to these and other important ends.